Just fancy that!

This week’s Economist has an engaging little piece about the travails of Sainsbury, the failing supermarket chain, which is suffering from the calamitous effects of the reign of its ousted Chief Exec, the portly Sir Peter Davis.

One of his blunders — according to the Economist — was “a fancy new IT system run by Accenture, a business-services firm. But that didn’t work either: Mr King [Sainsbury’s new Chief Exec] said that the new computer system had failed to deliver, and that the contract with Accenture would be re-negotiated. Being associated with such a high-profile failure might be expected to damage one’s reputation. Certainly Sir Peter’s looks tarnished. Happily, this fate seems to have escaped Ian Watmore, the man responsible for running Accenture’s IT consultancy business at the time. He has just been appointed to head up the e-Government unit in Whitehall, where he will oversee the government’s notoriously calamitous IT projects.”

Verily, you couldn’t make this stuff up.